While outdoor cooking is an ancient pursuit, modern conveniences have confined the need to cook out of doors to a pastime for entertainment. Following this trend, the standard pot-type charcoal-fired grill from the 1950s has been largely replaced with gas-fired grills sporting various accoutrements. Especially in the past several decades, many improvements have been made to gas-fired grills in order to better enable the user to grill food. Such improvements have included side burners to cook food in pots, and rotating spits, i.e. rotisseries, for improved, even roasting of food. The addition of rotisseries for use with gas grills has led to the further refinement of the grills themselves, including modifications to burners and different burner configurations, to yield better cooking results.
In cooking, there are two major heat transfer systems that work to heat the food: convection and radiation. While present, conductive heat transfer is a minor primary heat transfer mode, especially in a rotisserie where the food is cooked without direct contact to a cooking surface. Previous grill designs with rotisseries simply used the burners positioned underneath the cooking surface to cook the food using convection. In this convection arrangement, the hot air heated by the burners rises vertically to meet the food to be cooked. While some of the heat transferred to the food was also in the radiant form, convection was the main principle at work for such vertical heat rotisserie systems. The vertical heat systems had a number of potential drawbacks including the tendency for flare up when grease drippings produced by the cooking food fell to the hot burners below. In addition to being potentially dangerous to the user, the fires would also cause the food to burn, thus making a rotisserie less attractive.
Recently, burners positioned next to the rotating food and heating it horizontally, as opposed to underneath it, have been developed for outdoor gas grill rotisseries in order to improve cooking by using more radiant heat energy transfer. Although the horizontal heat rotisserie system resolved the problem of flaming grease drippings, improvements are still needed to make these systems more effective for consumers, as well as more economical to manufacture.
Along with horizontal burners, inventors have also developed baffles to help project and evenly disperse radiant heat energy created by the horizontal burners. The combination of a horizontal burner and properly designed baffle will combine to increase cooking efficiency and quality. A baffle also protects the user from potential direct contact with the flames. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,129,312, issued to Berger, discloses one such horizontal cooking burner operating in concert with a radiant baffle for outdoor gas grills with rotisseries.
Although gas grill designs continue to improve, a number of disadvantages still need to be addressed. As the demand for cooking on the grill increases, the variety of foods prepared by rotisserie grilling has expanded beyond just roasts and chickens. Depending on the size and shape of the food, conventional gas grills with rotisseries may not include the adequate dimensions and features to prepare such food. Growing concern to ensure that food is fully cooked in order to eliminate any disease-causing organisms in the food is also affecting the way people cook on back yard grills.
Consequently, various types of food require more thorough and complete cooking on specially dimensioned grills. While the rotisserie spit of most gas grills is typically as long as the grill's cooking surface, usually as a result of the necessity for supporting the spit on both sides of the grill housing, the conventional wisdom of manufacturing economy dictates that the horizontal burner be significantly shorter than the grill cooking surface. The arrangement is disadvantageous in the case that larger foods, such as turkeys, are being prepared. Therefore, the use of longer horizontal burners would assist the user to cook this type of food more thoroughly and effectively.
Another disadvantage faced by gas grills is the time and effort involved in their cleaning. Through the use of improved grill designs, people are more apt to entertain outdoors. This increase in outdoor entertainment around the grill has placed a higher usage load on each grill, creating the need for more frequent cleanings. Unfortunately, gas grill components are not easy to clean. The cooking surfaces and entire insides of the grill can become coated with burned on grease after a short interval. The grill parts, including the rotisserie system, should be kept simple, to a minimum of parts, and easy to clean.
Accordingly, a gas-fired cooker that does not have the limitations and shortcomings of the prior art would be highly desirable.